Centre for Civic Education (CCE), from February to April, organized eleven workshops for high school students on “Suppression and prevention of violence against LGBT persons“, within the project NO to Discrimination – YES to Diversity! implemented with the support of the Ministry for Human and Minority Rights of the Government of Montenegro. Previously, through this project were  implemented and presented findings of the survey of public opinion about LGBT persons.

During February, March and April, the project team visited ten high schools in eight Montenegrin municipalities, in the Northern, Central and Southern regions, talking to high school students about the position of LGBT persons in Montenegro, challenges they face and violence they suffer due to different sexual orientation. Furthermore, LGBT human rights activists, through the workshop method of “Living Libraries”, discussed with high school students how verbal and physical violence affects LGBT persons, how it arises, what are its manifestations and consequences, how to recognize it and to take an active stance in fight against this violence through peer education, then about the mechanisms of protection and reporting of specific cases, but also about the general position of LGBT persons in Montenegro. The “Live Library” method enabled high school students to find out in direct conversation with LGBT activists everything they were interested in about the gravity of the problems that LGBT community faces, to enlight certain prejudices they have, but also to find out how LGBT persons in Montenegro live and how they deal with misunderstanding of the environment.

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In Montenegro, we have documented continuity of regression within media sphere, which is visible through hard censorship, self-censorship and soft censorship. Moreover, there are also strong political pressures which had its culmination in the party overtaking of the public broadcaster Radio Television of Montenegro (RTCG).

That was assessed by the Executive Director of the Centre for Civic Education (CCE), Daliborka Uljarevic, at the conference ”Facts Do Matter“, organized by that organisation, within the framework of the same title project, supported by the Embassy of the Kingdom of Netherlands.

”That regression is visible in hard censorship, which includes attacks on journalists and media and these are mushrooming without an adequate outcome. Consequently, self-censorship occurs, because in a country where it is easy to go unpunished when physically intimidating journalists, there are less and less of those who want to put themselves at risk of being targeted by investigating issues that jeopardize the bearers of power. Also, through the so-called soft-censorship, by application of discretionary authority for allocation of public funds, unfair competition on the media market is boosted and sustainability of media endangered, ” she elaborated.

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Centre for Civic Education (CCE) organized today, from 11h00 to 13h00, in Podgorica, on the plateau in front of the National Library ‘Radosav Ljumovic’, second street action of collecting books to enrich the library of the Institute for the Execution of Criminal Sanctions (ZIKS).

During the two street actions, today and the first one that held in Podgorica on 6 April on the Roman  Square, nearly 175 books were collected.

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Public opinion when it comes to trust in the current judiciary system of Montenegro is divided, but slightly higher number of respondents states that has no trust in the judiciary, as indicated by data from the public opinion survey on transparency of judicary in Montenegro which the Centre for Civic Education (CCE) presented today.

’Those who express distrust, we asked to state three key reasons for that, and within the answers we dominantly got – presence of corruption, influence of politics or politicians on the work of the judiciary and lack of justice. Amongst overall reasons, the order of the first three remains unchanged, additionally procedure lenghth is high ranking, as well as poor human resources policy, selective initiating of cases by the Prosecutor’s office, conflict of interes, subjectivity of judges and the disparities of judicial practice, ’ explained Mira Popovic, CCE Programme Associate.

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